We have a picture of Elijah that is too painful to share. It’s him in his underwear, skin and bones, barely able to stand the morning I took him into Emergency. We had no idea what was wrong with him. Was it some form of cancer? Worms? Metabolic disorder? Why was he losing so much weight and deathly ill? It happened so fast we barely noticed the warning signs until it was almost too late. It turned out the culprit was his own body. He was dying from an auto immune disease that caused Type 1 Diabetes.

Before our son Elijah’s diagnoses of Type 1 diabetes, I had only a vague notion of what an autoimmune disease was. In Elijah’s case, his autoimmune disease meant that his body’s immune system flagged part of his pancreas as the enemy, and turned his own defense system on a healthy part of the body, destroying it for life. This mistake would have proved fatal if not for the discovery of insulin and his daily injections that replace what his own body destroyed.

As I was grieving the loss of Elijah’s beta cells, it struck me what a potent warning analogy an autoimmune disease is for the body of Christ. It is so easy to “flag” or mark other Christians as “the enemy”, and set the immune systems of gossip and condemnation upon that person.

With a sense of our holy mission to protect the body, we break fellowship or shun and encourage others to do the same. In so doing, we can unwittingly destroy a genuine and vital part of the body of Christ. We walk away congratulating ourselves on our “discernment,” and have no idea the fatal blow we may have dealt to Christ’s local body. Christ alone knows the function he had designed that person to perform in his body, the church, and how the body will suffer because it is missing that key component.

Don’t get me wrong: there is cancer and genuine disease that the body needs to be protected from. There is a place for warning against wolves and false teaching. But the immune system is explosive and powerful. We need to be so merciful and cautious in our attacks.

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By Jesse Jost

If you open your web browser these days, you’ll find plenty to get angry about: Planned Parenthood ripping up babies, ISIS mutilating Christians, politicians using corruption for selfish gains. Getting angry can feel good, maybe because our rage reassures us that we are in the righteous group of people who are above doing such filthy things, and that we still know how to acknowledge evil.

But is anger a healthy state for a Christian? How much of our anger is righteous and pleasing to God?

Righteous Wrath

Modern man is offended by the idea of a wrathful God. It seems a barbaric holdover from a more primitive time. “I can’t believe in a God of wrath, only a God of love.” My response would be, “How loving can God really be if he doesn’t get angry at what destroys his children?” Could a truly loving God simply smile benignly at rape, genocide, and oppression?

If you pull the wings off a fly, I won’t care. But if you harm one of my kids, I’ll get angry. What makes the difference? I love my child far more than I love the fly. The greater the love, the greater the wrath toward what harms the loved one.

My love is weak and unsubstantial compared to the mighty hurricane of God’s love. If you truly believe in a God of love, then I don’t think you have a choice but to also believe that God’s love makes Him angry at all that lures us away from Him into self-destruction.

When God became a man, He certainly got angry about the cancers of greed and self-righteousness. In a fit of zeal Jesus overthrew the temple tables and drove out merchants who were using religion as a means of financial gain. Jesus vehemently condemned hypocrisy and the casting aside of the broken and needy.

So if God the Father gets angry, and his Son, the God-Man gets angry, then surely we have the right – maybe even the obligation – to get angry, right? Isn’t the fear of the Lord to hate evil (Prov. 8:13)? Aren’t we commanded to “be angry, but do not sin?” (Eph. 4:26) Well, don’t get all worked up just yet, because I think the issue is a little more complicated. Continue reading…

My thoughts concerning Wm. Paul Young’s best-selling novel (Note:this review was written in 2010, but with the movie coming out this year, I thought I would republish it)

By Jesse Jost

Like most reviews of The Shack, I start out by telling you that my curiosity was piqued by hearing friends rave about the book, both in favor of it and against. It’s hard to resist reading a book that draws the fire of trusted conservative voices such as Mark Driscoll and Hank Hanegraaff, while at the same time garnering from Eugene Peterson one of the greatest compliments a Christian work of fiction can receive:  He compared it to Bunyan’s classic Pilgrim’s Progress. Curiosity finally got the best of me and I picked up a copy of this story that has been on the bestseller lists for months and now fills the pages of over three million books worldwide. Now that I have read it, I understand the controversy and compliments this book has stirred. My own journey to the shack increased my dangerous leaning towards schizophrenia…part of me loved certain aspects of the book, while the other part of me was battling feeling “queasy” (to use Hanegraaff’s word) and agitated. So this review will be written by two people in one body. The parts praising the book will be written by my “ego”, while my concerns will be written by my “id”. (I may be using Freud’s terminology wrong, but only because I don’t care to do the research needed to accurately portray Freud’s theories. If he doesn’t like it, he can blame it on my repressed memories.)

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By Jesse Jost

Wherever you look, deterioration and disintegration are the natural order of things. The law of entropy is a brutal beast. With the near constant slide away from God that we see in our nations, churches, and relationships, it is easy to become cynical. In fact, it seems a badge of righteousness to be a prophet of doom, and bemoan the secularization of religious institutions, churches, and culture. It’s as if we feel our ability to highlight decay or trends toward liberalism is proof of our faithfulness.

But griping about moral decline is not a sign of godliness. Listen to any talk show, or coffee table chat, and you will hear rants about how bad things are getting, even from the most ungodly sources. It is not a righteous or godly thing to complain about the state of things. It is a human thing. Ever since we left Eden we long for “the good ol days,” (often glossing over the bad and exaggerating the good) and bemoan the inevitable slide towards degeneration.

When God made the world, we were assigned to be the caretakers of creation and in our rebellion, we made a horrendous mess: Endless violence, infanticide, rape, the oppression of women, slavery, the exploitation of the poor and weak, etc. There was every reason to despair.

But then something radical and unexpected happened. Continue reading…